Ten Years Of The TSA (Yes, It Seems Much Longer)

Becky Akers is a freelance writer and historian. Here, she demands that the TSA be abolished.

The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) celebrates its tenth birthday this weekend – but felicitations aren’t exactly pouring in. Many dislike the TSA, from the passengers it assaults at airports to the legislators who authorized its creation and continue to fund its $8 billion annual budget.

In fact, a “Joint Majority Staff Report” from Congress lambasted the agency earlier this week with what the Washington Post called “harshly critical” findings. I suppose “harshly critical” is in the eye of the beholder: anyone who has helplessly agonized while screeners forced his elderly mother from her wheelchair or who has tried to comfort a toddler while a stranger plunges his hands down the boy’s britches would protest that the report doesn’t come within a country mile of “harshness.”

“Americans have spent nearly $60 billion, and they are no safer today than they were before 9/11,” Rep. Paul Broun (R-GA) announced when releasing the report. In other words, the TSA has squandered as much money as has been “lost to contract waste and fraud in America’s contingency operations in Iraq and Afghanistan…,” according to NPR and the “independent and bipartisan” Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan. Heck, maybe we ought to shuffle the TSA out of the Department of Homeland Security and over to the Pentagon, given its inefficient and very costly war on the American people.

Pres. George W. Bush signed the bill establishing the TSA on November 19, 2001. The agency took about a year to nationalize aviation’s security; in 2002, it spent $1.3 billion – a whopping increase over the $725 million “private” screening annually cost. (But was that industry really “private”? The FAA mandated and minutely supervised everything it did. Which is exactly why terrorists succeeded on 9/11: incompetent bureaucrats controlled security at airports and fined any airline that didn’t obey their silly whims.)

What do we have to show for it? Not a single terrorist caught anywhere at any time by anyone in the TSA’s employ.

Predictably, the agency pretends that its abuses have thwarted more 9/11′s. But as Rep. Broun says, “TSA has not prevented any attacks … It’s just been very fortunate that we’ve had no attacks.”

Actually, we’ve had millions of attacks – by the TSA on innocent passengers. That $60 billion has bought us jaw-dropping cruelty, ruined lives, and widespread brutality.

We’ve all heard about the elderly lady dying of leukemia whose diaper the TSA “inspected.” And the survivor of bladder-cancer whom the TSA soaked in his own urine – twice, in two separate incidents – when screeners manhandled him. Each time, he pleaded with them not to break the seal on his urostomy bag; each time, they ignored him.

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